In a typical semiconductor manufacturing industry, microchips at a test handler are normally carried away after the testing unit through sliding down a metal shaft which is called flow channel. The intense market competition and the continual cost-down of the consumer electronics products like TV, video, computer, mobile phone and a host of other electronic devices has put great pressure for the manufacturers to aggressively seek cost-down by increasing the throughput with faster production and making smaller IC chips. This translates to a need for faster movement of the IC chips along the test handlers. Unfortunately, this increase in speed of the production process which causes higher generation of static electricity via tribo-charging leads to the sticking of the IC chips along the flow channel after testing operation due to electrostatic attraction. The need in making smaller IC chips further aggravate this problem as even minute static generation will cause sticking as the mass of the chips is now very light. Such sticking causes jamming of the machine thus seriously impedes the output and productivity of the manufacturing operation.
An earlier unpublished application PCT/CN/2011/076825 has disclosed a device for static charge reduction capable of overcoming the problem described above.
However, the solution offered in the earlier unpublished application PCT/CN/2011/076825 suffers a limitation of use in an open space system outside the said moisture controlled enclosure invention. Many work operations are indeed carried out in an open space assembly work area. The use of the device for static charge reduction in the earlier unpublished application limits to only the localized air inside the enclosure.
To overcome such limitation, an ordinary person skilled in the art may design a system such that a steady stream of controlled air stream blowing out from the incoming tubing 12 to the outgoing tubing 22 with a higher suction power positioned in line with a spaced-apart air gap to suck in the blown out air stream thereby moving the air passage from the incoming tubing 12 to the outgoing tubing 22 to form a leak-free air passage control system as shown in FIG. 21.
However, when come to a big or odd-shape object, the effectiveness of the controlled air stream passage from the incoming tubing 12 to the outgoing tubing 22 using such blow out and suck in system described in the previous paragraph will find difficulty to cover the whole object properly thereby jeopardising the effectiveness of a complete static charge neutralisation of the object to be treated.
A solution may be found by putting up more outgoing tubing stations positioned in a space-out arrangement in an attempt to achieve the complete air passage coverage of the object to be treated but the cost for such elaborated system is uneconomical and lacks commercial attractiveness.
Therefore further research and development is needed to overcome the above limitation.